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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Dear Colleague,

Not that her detractors will go softly into the night, but at
least Betsy DeVos is now in place as the Secretary of Education. While the
teachers unions and other education establishmentarians are angry and fearful
as to what she might try to do, the fact is that her powers are limited. As
spelled out in rational way (a rarity on this issue), Fordham Institute
president Mike Petrilli details her job description.

President Trump
selected her to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. That person’s job is to do
education politics and policy—to work with members of Congress and governors,
to understand how a bill becomes a law, to provide moral support to reformers
as they fight it out in the states and at the local level. With her decades of
involvement in politics, with policymakers, and in the trenches of the parental
choice movement, DeVos is an inspired choice for the job that the Senate
confirmed her for yesterday.

…During her
confirmation process, DeVos promised time and again to shrink Uncle Sam’s
impact on the nation’s schools—to devolve decisions back to states,
communities, educators and parents. That’s in keeping with the mandate from
Congress, which just over a year ago updated the major K–12 law to expressly
limit the federal role in education.

Another article,
this one by director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, Michael
McShane asks us to “Rethink School Accountability” and “Stop the outcry over
DeVos' approach and consider real reform, instead.” His piece in US News & World Report starts,

In many Eastern religions, practitioners use
mantras to calm and center themselves while meditating. If the school choice
movement needs a mantra right now, it just might be: Regulating a market is not
the same as regulating a monopoly.

I say this because of the huge outcry around
the putative beliefs of Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's nominee for
education secretary, on how to bring accountability to charter schools and
schools that participate in voucher programs. Differing conceptions of
accountability have become equated with being "for" or
"against" the idea, in toto. But which is more strict? Requiring that
schools be evaluated on an A-to-F scale and automatically kicked out of a
charter program if they fail? Or establishing a mayorally-appointed commission
to decide what schools should and shouldn't stay open? I actually don't know.

The looming teacher (and other
public employee) pension disaster for taxpayers is not news. But what has gone
under-reported is that young teachers entering the field are carrying a
disproportionate amount of the load. And if those teachers don’t make teaching
a career for life, they lose out. Big time.

All this is spelled
out in recent a Fordham Institute report. As the introduction to the detailed 378 page analysis
states, “A new teacher’s pension is supposed to be a perk. The truth is that
for the majority of the nation’s new teachers, what
they can anticipate in retirement benefits will be worth less than what they
contributed to the system while they were in the classroom, even if they
stay for decades.” The even sadder news is that no one in a position of power
seems to be willing to do anything about it.

The report’s
author EdChoice’s Martin Lueken found that the median “crossover point” of the
fifty-one districts across the country he examined is 25 years, which means
that teachers in more than half of these districts have to teach a quarter of a
century before they reach the point where their retirement benefits are worth
more than their contributions.

The latest entry by
the National Council on Teacher Quality on teacher evaluations is out.Running in Place: How New Teacher Evaluations
Fail to Live Up to Promisesis
part of the tenth annual publication in theState
Teacher Policy Yearbookreport
series. The report “finds that within the 30 states that require student
learning measures to be at least a significant factor in teacher
evaluations, state guidance and rules in most states allow teachers to be
rated effective even if they receive low scores on the student learning
component of the evaluation.”The report also includes recommendations
for how states can address this problem.

On the school choice front, New Hampshire State Senator John
Regan has penned an article which extols the virtues of choice.

Ed
Choice (formerly Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice) has presented 33
empirical studies all showing positive results from school choice. Twenty-eight
of these same studies (a whopping 85 percent) showed positive, or neutral
fiscal effects. Other studies show a higher level of awareness of both civic
values and responsibilities.

On a
tour of a New Hampshire charter school, I asked what were some of the reasons
why students choose to transfer to a charter school. The number one response:
No bullying.

Another win for school choice is that of additional learning and higher test
scores. Former Rep. Jason Bedrick, now a member of the Cato Institute, writes ‘
… highly significant educationally meaningful achievement gains of several
months of additional learning from school choice.’

Also on the subject of choice “A Federal Scholarship Tax Credit: The
Only Fifty-State School-Choice Option” is a thoughtful piece written by Thomas
W. Carroll, president of the Invest in Education Coalition. He writes about a
bill by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Representative Todd Rokita
(R-Indiana) that “proposes a federal tax credit for K–12 scholarships that is
independent of state programs—much like federal tax credits for buying electric
vehicles.” He also writes,

Not only is such a federal
school-choice tax credit doable—it’s the only way President Trump can
effectively bring school choice to families in the blue states that voted for
him in 2016 and others that might in the future. No other solution can
immediately benefit every American student. A competitive grant program, for
example, would at most affect a half-dozen states. And categorical block grants
that can be turned into school vouchers require state-by-state approval,
meaning ‘choice’ states would likely allow, but ‘non-choice’ states would not.

In January, Kentucky became the 27th right-to-work state
in the nation, and this month Missouri became #28. In a few short years, the
RTW movement has picked up considerably. Between 1947 and 2011, just three
states opted for worker freedom. But since 2012, six states have been added to
the RTW column, and others are moving in that direction. And that’s not the
only bad news for the unions. In
November 2016, the National Right to Work Foundation,
along with the Liberty Justice Center,
filed a brief on behalf of two Illinois government employees. Mark Janus, a child
support services worker at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family
Services, and Brian Trygg, a transportation engineer, resent their unions’
forced dues regimen and are suing them. Janus
v. AFSCME could make it to the Supreme Court as soon as next year.

Also,
three new federal court cases challenging the constitutionality of forcing
public employees to pay union dues were filed in January. Government
workers – including Pennsylvania teachers, California medical center employees,
and New York school employees – are plaintiffs. These cases, being filed with
legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation,
argue that “state requirements that the plaintiffs pay mandatory union fees as
a condition of government employment violate the First Amendment.”

Then on February 6th, The Center
for Individual Rights (the same group that brought the Friedrichs case) filed a lawsuit
against the state of California and the California Teachers Association “on
behalf of eight California public school teachers and the Association of
American Educators. The teachers are challenging California’s “agency shop”
law, which CIR says violates the First Amendment by forcing them to pay annual
fees to the union – even if they are not a member.

And
finally, as you well know, information is frequently used to score political
points and make cases for various causes. To that end, CTEN has a “cheat sheet”
on our website – with original sources. To see it, go to http://www.ctenhome.org/cheatsheet.htmlIf
you have information that counters what’s there or would like to see something
added, please let us know.

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